What is Johnny Rose’s Pool Hall?
At the corner of Main Street and Brown Avenue, under a red Mexican Imports front, is a two-story building of white glazed brick with a stepped parapet. The brick is what gives it away as a different era from the false fronts around it. Johnny Rose imported it in 1923 so his new building would stand out from everything else on Main Street.
Rose had already been on this spot for years, running a frame store whose sign promised “Fancy Groceries: Shoe Repairing, Barber Shop, Pool Hall, Ice Cream, Confectionary, and Soft Drinks.” According to Salt River Stories, it was also, at various times, a vaudeville stage, a silent-movie theater, a lunch counter and a classroom, and the pool hall was popular with Scottsdale’s Mexican residents. As businesses on Main Street specialized, the city’s register report says, Rose tore down his all-purpose store and built this hall for billiards, pool and silent movies.
Six years later he sold it to Jew Chew Song and left town. The Song family turned it into a grocery, built a home with a hipped roof onto the back, and in the 1950s made it Mexican Imports. Their story is told on their own page. This page is about the building and about Rose, who in his years on this corner was fined, arrested, led a patriotic fundraising drive and rented his hall out as a schoolroom, all in one decade.
How to see it
It’s a shop, so walk in. The building is the Mexican Imports store, open to the public. Check its hours before you go. The shop is covered in our Mexican Imports guide.
Read the front. The city’s register report describes a two-story masonry building with a basement, a flat roof behind stepped parapet walls, and walls of white glazed brick on a concrete base that runs flush across the front and projects along the south side. In the middle is a double-door entry between big display windows in wood frames, with a large signboard above. The wooden porch across the front came later.
Walk the south side. Look for two horizontal sliding metal windows that sit on the original brick sills, and two larger openings that have been filled in. Behind the main block is the two-story red-brick wing with a hipped roof, a single door with boarded windows on each side, and a wooden balcony on square posts wrapping the south and east sides of the upper floor. That wing is the Songs’. The register report says Song wanted the flared, bell-cast eaves of Chinese buildings and couldn’t find a local builder to do them, so the hip roof was his compromise, “an attempt, on his part, to bring a bit of ‘Chinatown’ to Scottsdale.”
Make it a corner. Three of Old Town’s oldest commercial buildings stand within a few steps of each other. Across Main is the 1921 bank that became the Rusty Spur. Next door is the Sterling Drug building of the same year, which became Saba’s. Salt River Stories has a photo from about 1920 looking south on Brown, with Rose’s hall on one side and Sterling Drug across the street, from the Scottsdale Historical Society collection. The Old Town on foot route ties the block together, and the Little Red Schoolhouse is a block east.
The man who sold everything
Most of what is known about Johnny Rose comes from one source, a Salt River Stories article by Michelle Bickert and Stephanie McBride Schreiner, which quotes the Arizona Republican and draws on photographs from the Scottsdale Historical Society. It describes a man who tried to be the whole downtown of a small farm town by himself. His store sold groceries and ice cream, cut hair and fixed shoes. Its pool hall held dances and vaudeville acts and showed silent movies.
He was also a civic man. During World War I, Rose was a captain in Scottsdale’s Liberty Loan drive, and he then served, training at Kelly Field in San Antonio with 140 other men from the Valley. In 1917, at 32, he married Paulita S. Valenzuela, 16, the daughter of what the article calls a highly respected Mexican family. They lived behind the hall. And during the day, he leased the hall as a classroom for Mexican children “until they had their own school in 1922.” That detail belongs next to the town’s later history of segregated schooling. Local histories usually date the separate Coronado School to 1928, and the record we found doesn’t say what school the 1922 date refers to. The school district’s records from those years would be the place to check.
Pool halls in a dry town
Scottsdale’s founders built a sober colony, and Salt River Stories says the town voted to outlaw alcohol a decade before national Prohibition. Territorial law already banned gambling. A pool hall in that town worked on the edge of the rules, and Rose went over it. In 1916 he pleaded guilty to running a pool hall that was “a menace to the community” and was fined $25. In 1917 he was arrested for gambling and fined $100.
There’s also the night in the summer of 1916 when a ranch hand named John Kennedy brought a supply of liquor into town and threw a party in the pool hall. The Arizona Republican reported that he “proceeded to uncork enough booze to render the village blacksmith invisible, the pool hall proprietor indisposed,” and much of the town with them. The paper didn’t name the proprietor. Kennedy pleaded guilty and paid $109. Rose wasn’t the only operator in town. A photograph of Hefron’s Billiard Hall and Scottsdale Cafe survives in the library’s collection.
The brick hall and the sale
By the early 1920s Main Street had more specialized shops, and the city’s register report says Rose rebuilt to compete. In 1923 he tore down the frame store and put up the present building in white glazed brick, chosen to set it apart. It was built for billiards, pool and silent movies. He ran it for six years. In 1929 he sold it to Jew Chew Song, whose name also appears as Jew She Song in a 1948 photo caption. Salt River Stories says the Songs came from Gilbert. The family’s own account, on their page, has a son born in Chandler that year. The Songs dropped the entertainment and opened a grocery. The record we found doesn’t say where Rose went or what he did afterward. In its audio tour Salt River Stories says he left town “abruptly.”
Why it matters
The city’s register report says the building illustrates “the pattern of commercial development that typically occurs as towns grow”: an all-purpose store, then a specialized one, then a family business that changed with the town. In practice this building shows the farm-town Scottsdale its later western image left out, with vaudeville, illegal liquor, Mexican families as customers and pupils, and a Chinese family who stayed for ninety years. It was listed on the Scottsdale Historic Register on October 3, 2000. You can still walk into it and buy something, which is how it has been used since 1923.